CIO career management and life beyond CIO-dom

There are two avenues of growth for CIOs in India. One is outside the organization, like what I
have done. The other is within the organization. The CIO is probably the only person apart from the
CFO
who

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has a role in all functions. Today, there's no Indian organization where the CIO is not
involved in automating every aspect of the organization -- internal, human resources, finance and
the customer-facing aspects. So board-level participation for the CIO is going to be an essential
aspect.

Also, there are many emerging requirements such as ISO
38500, where the board will be made responsible for tracking how IT is being used for
governance. There's a huge responsibility for the board and independent directors to have systems
in place which monitor how IT delivers business value. Once it comes to the board level, who can
explain it better than the CIO? So I see a natural inclination for Indian organizations to promote
the CIO to the board. Clearly, that means the CIO has arrived and is on par with the other
CXOs.

Now there's a lot of maturity in many Indian organizations. Earlier, the CIO was considered an
adjunct to the CFO. Today, he's the CEO's ally. If a CEO has to cut costs and improve operations
efficiency, the CIO is the enabler. Additionally, there's increasing demand from customers who are
natural at adopting technology. So the CIO's role clearly becomes much more responsible.

In your case, the transition from a CIO to founding an organization like RuralShores was
quite radical. How did this change come about?

Interactions with people who had done other things made me look differently at life. One of our
promoters had earlier set up a BPO called Saiseva at Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh. After a visit
to Saiseva, I realized that it's a great way to create economic and social inclusion of
villagers.

Currently, there are no options for educated people in many Indian villages. So we thought of
creating an ecosystem. In a small way, it's possible for India to stem the migration from villages
to city by keeping these people in their villages. This is an issue which creates problems in the
villagers' lives, as well as of those in the city. If you preserve the village ecosystem, people
are more likely to live in a better way than if they were in a city slum. By bringing economic
activity to villages, we feel that it's possible for them to have more options for a better
livelihood.

So how did RuralShores happen?

Emerging requirements such as ISO 38500 necessitate that the
board is responsible for tracking how IT is being used for governance. At the board level, who
can explain it better than the CIO?C N Ram
DirectorRuralShores Business Services Pvt Ltd.

We are a group of six people who thought on similar lines.
Around 15 years back, many Indian companies had approached American and European companies to bring
work to India. The reasoning was that we will do it at a far lesser cost in India with the
advantages of better minds, better processes and efficiency. That's how the BPO revolution was
born.

We thought about offering the same revolution to the Indian corporate. The only way of doing it
is to take it to villages where costs are much lower. This was very exciting, since we could use
technology quite disruptively. The Indian government was also focused on improving the lot of the
villages. So we took a bet that infrastructure was bound to improve in villages.

Our first center was thus set up in Bagepalli, a village 100 kms from Bengaluru on NH7. We will
go only to remote villages, since that's where people need economic sustenance. Our aim is to set
up 500 centers across India in the next seven years, each employing around 200 people. So we are
effectively looking at creating 1,00,000 rural jobs. Each employee will be permanent and paid state
minimum wages. Even then, we can offer Indian companies the kind of cost arbitrage which India
earlier offered to the U.S. and European corporate. The Indian corporate, especially at this time
in the economic slowdown, is looking at ways to reduce costs. We can offer them value, with no
compromise on quality.

We are not offering end-to-end services. Very specific low-end work which does not have to be
done in the cities can be done by us. We are open to taking up functions such as data entry,
response to email, processing insurance claims, etc.

We don't see it as a static phenomenon where we handle only data entry. Once we start to ramp up
and convince our customers that it's possible for them to trust us with quality outsourcing, we
want to take up more complicated jobs. Our 500 centers will be across India. Education levels are
very high in many parts of the country, especially in South India. So we will actually take
slightly more intellectually stimulating jobs for such regions.

What about technology infrastructure in these villages?

We go to places where there's telecommunication and power. If power's a problem, we use generators.
Today, connectivity is not a problem since BSNL is present everywhere. We go with one more service
provider like Reliance or Bharti for the backup. We do not want to get into a situation where we
lack quality. We want to promise the corporate that even though it has an economically better deal,
it comes without quality compromises.

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